Dell stands accused of deliberately hiding emails that showed its top executives in the mid-2000s knew the company was shipping millions of defective computers, one of its customers alleged in court filings Thursday.
Web hosting provider Advanced Internet Technologies, which alleges Dell knowingly sold computers that contained …

COMMENTS

Is this a surprise?

Around these parts, Dell has long had a reputation for being unreliable hardware.

I used to tell friends who asked me for advice on a computer purchase: "Don't buy a Dozebox. If you buy a Dozebox anyway, don't buy a Dell." Then of course they'd ask me to fix the problems they were having with that Dell that was "most affordable" (i.e. cheapest).

Yep! They bubbled and bubbled and then they died . . .

. . .the capacitors on the SX270s. We lost hundreds of them most of them out of warranty. We got a local electronics guy to replace the burned capacitor and the motherboards lived happily for two more years.

Dell is DONE

Covering up and selling products that you know will likely fail is absolutely despicable.

Will you ever purchase ANYTHING from Dell again? I sure as hell will not.

When Western Digital shipped a batch of defective hard drives some years back they reacted by immediately recalling the drives and publicizing the issue so that customers could exchange the drives for new ones. In the end they gained credibility and the stock went up and they got past the issue by FIXING it.

Isnt it amazing...

Isnt it amazing the difference reputable companies and piece of shit companies, Seagate went thru a similar scenario, and their response was on par with WD's, they acknowledged the problem and offered a fix for the people who's drives hadn't yet stopped working, and the people who's drives did stop working, they offered data recovery services free of charge, which was actually just putting the correct firmware on the drives after the customer sent them in, then shipping it back working, but the end the result was the same, the customer got their drives back, in working order with all their data intact...

Dell on the other hand chooses the lie lie deny, counter accuse, deny deny approach to the problem, which unfortunately is the same approach that most companies take these days.

Seagate 1.5TB problems

Is this a recent development? Seagate's response to widespread 1.5TB problems was Deny Deny Deny, have the customer apply a firmware and when it didn't work attempt to invalidate the warranties, blame it on the BIOS and OS, and force the customer to pay for their own data recovery, for at least 12 months after their Nov'08 introduction. The refurbished replacements they sent out would themselves die quickly or arrive dead. The firmware was supposedly bad right up into early 2010 before they got it right, by which time most of the older drives were dead. I swore off Seagate forever after that.

Nightmare

The bad caps affected many companies in the industry, including the one I worked for (not Dell). It was a total nightmare for everyone because conventional component quality evaluation and lifetime testing techniques couldn't detect the problem in a useful timescale. The problem only emerged when large quantities were already in the field.

Though Dell have been a competitor, I have to grudgingly admit they generally make good quality kit that's solidly engineered. There are some other big names that I respect rather less for quality of engineering. However it appears Dell hasn't been so impressive in how they handled the customer impact.

Wasn't just dell

There were boatloads of motherboards that failed due to these caps. I had two gigabyte titans, both failed with duff caps, an abit also failed and i repaired dozens by changing the obviously popped caps usually around the cpu.

Agree

I had a Asus Mother board back then that caps failed after around 2 years due to caps(they started oozing). My friend who bought the same exact motherboard the same day his failed 1 week after mine did for the same exact reason. A guy I was working with had the same board his failed same way. I talked to 2 after that a few years later and we got into talking about motherboards and they had the same board and theirs failed the same way too. So maybe people should sue asus now for crap boards in that time frame

O how the mighty have fallen

Dell were, at one stage, THE company to buy from because they had customer service second to none with extremely high satisfaction rates. Now they just smell like bad fish. I wouldn't buy or recommend a Dell ever again.

Asus should be sued too

In my experience and that of many other consumers Asus ships a lot of half-baked goods and uses consumers as beta testers. If they were a U.S. company their CEO would be in prison for fraud IMO. It's truely criminal what these PC companies get away with.

Caps failing on monitors now

I came across plenty of failed motherboard caps at that time. Story goes it stemmed from Taiwanese guys working for a Japanese firm and stealing the formula for the electrolyte and selling it to Taiwnese cap brands. Problem was they got the formula wrong.

Right now on the forums there are daily postings about capacitor failure in flatscreens affecting several brands. From checking a few myself (repair is very easy, incidentally) it seemed to me that the heat generated, perhaps by the illumination or the power needed for it, was excessive in a slim, poorly ventilated space.

Origin of faulty caps

I heard a different story about the problem. Chinese organised slime bought cheap audio-grade caps on the open market, employed slave labour to replace the labels with fake good-name low-ESR labels. They then sold the relabelled caps back into the market at the (in)appropriate premium price. It was a year or more before they started to fail in service, by which stage the criminals were long gone with their loot, and ~50M motherboards were doomed to die young with brown gunk oozing out of their caps. Also, they always went flakey for weeks or months before they failed completely.

I don't think one can blame manufacturers of boards or systems for the problem if this is the cause. It's how such a problem is handled that's significant. Note the blatant lie "customers' data is not at risk" in the Dell mail. Anything that can cause a computer to crash poses a risk to the data that it is processing, or to the process that it is monitoring.

When I'm asked what I think of a company that's shipped us lots of kit that works perfectly, I say "OK". I don't have what I need to say "Bargepole" or "Brilliant". I get that when something goes wrong, which I assume is inevitable given enough time. A brilliant company accepts responsibility (not the same as blame) and sorts it out, fast. A bad one finds excuse after excuse for doing nothing, or simply fails to answer the phone in any meaningful way (call centre hell or plain no answer). What are these bargepole outfits thinking? That's I'm stupid enough to risk being fooled twice? Or that there are plenty of other suckers out there?

A grenade ... what the Chinese Slime deserve, along with any company that employs people to deny problems instead of fixing them.

@Fihart - Caps in monitors

Yep, we had a whole bunch of LG monitors die within a few weeks of each other. I emailed LG and they called the next business day. We arranged a date for their techs to come out and they came wielding soldering irons and replaced the caps on-site!

Caps failing on stacks of other stuff too

I've got two blown boards (as in bits of the actual board's fibreglass & tracks are missing and there's charred paper where the capacitor used to be) from my 5.1 surround sound Logitech speakers, and my 7.1 set of Creatives went the same way 6 weeks after I'd sold them.

LOTS of companies could be sued in a similar fashion to Dell if bad capacitors were criminal.

Come to think of it, I wonder of "Not Suitable for Purpose" would be a way of returning them? They were being run well within their limits- volume never topped 1/4 of what they're able to do.

Not just capacitors

The place I work, a call centre, had brand spanking new Dell desktop tower machines rolled out. A few months later, the power supplies started dying. So what did Dell do? No - they didn't come in and replace the computers, the sent a bloody great box of new power supplies and a screw driver.

Don't assume the problem was limited to computers...

Warranty not extended in the UK, well not for free as might be inferred.

We had to pay for extended warranty on the units we had. I'm glad we did as every single motherboard was replaced at least once, but Dell saying they extended them is untrue, except in the respect that they sold this as a service, in the UK at least.

We used to buy lots of Dell kit, but after this we embargoed purchases from them until they have the good grace to come and make reparations. I'm still embargoing suppliers from nearly two decades ago who've pissed me off. I just need to be CIO at a really big company to make it bite!